Rosalind is a consummate actress so it’s only appropriate that my first thanks go to the great actors who have so generously talked to me about their experiences of playing Rosalind from the 1960s to the present day, both female and male, established stars and rising young names. They are Janet Suzman, Ronald Pickup, Juliet Stevenson, Juliet Rylance, Sally Scott, Adrian Lester and Michelle Terry. From an award winning director’s perspective, Blanche McIntyre also gave me an invaluable interview.
Friends, scholars and thespians who discussed Rosalind with me, pointed me towards early theatrical performances, or to unknown images, or to examples of Rosalind’s daughters in the modern world, include Kate Bassett, Valerie Fehlbaum, Charlotte Gray, Lavinia Greacen, Jean Hewison, Eva Hoffman, Rosalind Kaye, Linda Matlin, Pam Morris, Susannah Pearse, Virginia Surtees and John Wallace. From the sphere of my previous biographies, Pre-Raphaelite experts and friends on both sides of the Atlantic such as Judith Bronkhurst, Dennis Lanigan, Tim McGee, Len Roberts and Francis Sharp have offered vital insights and sleuthing about works of art inspired by Shakespeare.
Three libraries in particular have been key to my reading about Rosalind, and their librarians unfailingly helpful. These are The London Library, the British Library and the exceptional public library in the Barbican Centre. I am also very grateful to The Institute of Psychoanalysis whose unique programme, ‘The Stuff of Dreams’ in 2014/15 chaired by Andrea Sabbadini, gave me another perspective. Their inspired season combined showings of films of Shakespeare’s plays with probing discussions between actors, critics, academics and psychoanalysts.
I am particularly indebted to my scrupulous first readers of Rosalind, the Shakespearean scholar, Professor Russ McDonald, and my son, the writer Adam Thirlwell. My daughter Zoë Thirlwell read the Interval chapter on Elizabeth I with her historian’s eye.
This book could not have been written without the regular once a month, one-to-one writers’ meetings I enjoy with my oldest friend, Patricia Potts (Tosh) who has consistently encouraged and challenged me. Her expertise and intellectual rigour, in different fields from my own, made me try to hone every sentence!
At Oberon I’ve been blessed with the most enthusiastic, supportive and meticulous editor in George Spender. His colleague James Illman provided the gorgeously decorative and allusive jacket design for which I’m hugely grateful. My thanks go to the Biographers’ Club without whose annual dinner I would never have met James Hogan and Charles Glanville who run Oberon Books and liked my idea of a biography of Rosalind from the start. Thanks as ever go to my wise literary agent, Felicity Bryan, and her loyal assistant, Michele Topham, in Oxford.
My lifelong debts are to Shakespeare himself who gave me such a rich and creative subject in Rosalind, and to my two unforgettable teachers of his works, Laura Pettoello and Hugo Dyson.